Charles Sidney Gilpin
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Charles Sidney Gilpin (November 20, 1878 - May 6, 1930) worked as an apprentice in the Richmond Planet print shop before finding his career in theater and becoming one of the most highly regarded actors of the 1920s. He first came on stage as a singer at the age of twelve. In 1896, Gilpin joined a minstrel show, leaving Richmond and beginning a life on the road for many years. While not on stage in theaters, restaurants, and fairs he worked odd jobs as a printer, barber, boxing trainer, and railroad porter. In 1903, Gilpin joined Hamilton, Ontario’s Canadian Jubilee Singers.
Two years later he performed with the red cross and the candy shop of America traveling musical troupes. He also played his first dramatic roles and honed his character acting while he appeared with Robert Mott’s Pekin Theater in Chicago for four years, until 1911. Soon after, he toured the United States with the Pan-American Octetts and spent some time with Rogers and Creamer’s Old Man’s Boy Company in New York. In 1915, Gilpin joined the Anita Bush Players as it moved from the Lincoln Theater in Harlem to the Lafayette Theater, a time when many famous black theatrical careers were launched.
In 1916, he made a memorable appearance in whiteface as Jacob McCloskey, a slave owner and villain of Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon. Though he left Bush’s Company over salary, his reputation while there allowed him to get the role of Rev. William Curtis in the 1919 premier of John Drinkwater’s Abraham Lincoln. Gilpin'sBroadway debut moved him next into Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, a role he played to great critical acclaim, including an Oneill-lauded review by Hubert Harrison in the "Negro World." His work with this production allowed the Drama League of New York to name Gilpin as one of the ten people who had done the most for American theater in 1920, the first Black American so honored.
His invitation to the league’s presentation dinner, however, created a public controversy that ended with his attendance. Following the Drama League’s refusal to rescind the invitation and Gilpin’s refusal to decline it, he was given a standing ovation of unusual length on accepting the award. The recipient of the NAACPs Spingarn Medal in 1921, Gilpin was also honored in the White House of president Warren G. Harding. A year later the Dumas Dramatic Club (now the Karamu Players) of Cleveland renamed itself the Gilpin Players in his Honor.
Although Gilpin continued to perform the role of Brutus Jones in the U.S. tour that followed the Broadway closing of the play, a falling out with O'Neill over such things as Gilpin's refusal to say the word "nigger", a word that O'Neill had written into the play over thirty times, led to problems for Gilpin and ultimately caused him to lose the part of Brutus Jones to Paul Robeson in the London production that followed. His rise to fame soon eclipsed by controversy and alcohol, Gilpin never again performed on Broadway and died in 1930 in Eldridge Park, New Jersey, his career in a shambles. He now lies in an unmarked grave in Woodlawn Cemetery, reburied there by friends shortly after his death.
[edit] References
- Henry T. Sampson The Ghost Walks: A Chronological History of Blacks in Show Business 1865-1910
Scarecrow Press (Metuchen, NJ, 1988), p.321.
- "Charles Sidney Gilpin." Dictionary of American Biography Base Set. American Council of Learned Societies, 1928-1936.
- John T. Kneebone, "'It Wasn't All Velvet': The Life and Hard Times of Charles S. Gilpin, Actor," Virginia Cavalacde 38 (summer 1988): 14-27.
